Category: Corporate Statism

Serfing U.S.A.

~ susie

Joss Whedon of “Buffy” and “Avengers” fame at ComicCon:

Toward the end of the session, one woman noted the anti-corporate themes in many of his movies and asked him to give his economic philosophy in 30 seconds or less.


Whedon’s response?


“We are watching capitalism destroy itself right now,” he told the audience.


He added that America is “turning into Tsarist Russia” and that “we’re creating a country of serfs.”


Whedon was raised on the Upper Westside neighborhood of Manhattan in the 1970s, an area associated with left-leaning intellectuals. He said he was raised by people who thought socialism was a ”beautiful concept.”


Socialism remains a taboo word in American politics, as Republicans congressmen raise the specter of the Cold War. They refer to many Obama administration initatives as socialist, and the same goes for most laws that advocate increasing spending on social welfare programs. They also refer to the President as a socialist, though this and many of their other claims misuse the term.


This evidently frustrates Whedon, who traces this development to Ronald Reagan – the nominal hero of the modern conservative movement. Since then, Whedon believes the country has changed in way that has made it too difficult for regular people to succeed.


And what is the end result?


“We have people trying to create structures and preserve the structures that will help the middle and working class, and people calling them socialists,” Whedon said. “It’s not Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal […] it’s some people with some sense of dignity and people who have gone off the reservation.” Guess he’s not a Tea Party fan.

A major glitch in the Romneybot

~ odd man out ~ 1 Comment
Mitt Romney is quick to spout racist slurs and lies about the economy, but most Republicans can’t really warm up to him, not even the wing nuts.

From the always-quotable Matt Taibbi:

…[Romney] doesn’t buzz with anything. His vision of humanity is just a million tons of meat floating around in a sea of base calculations. He’s like a teenager who stays up all night thinking of a way to impress the prom queen, and what he comes up with is kicking a kid in a wheelchair. Instincts like those are probably what made him a great leveraged buyout specialist, but in a public figure? Man, is he a disaster. It’s really incredible theater, watching the Republicans talk themselves into this guy.

Taibbi’s words were in response to a speech by Mitt Romney to the NAACP, followed by speeches to Republican crowds in Montana. In his false attempt to reach out to the NAACP, Romney offered up the standard Republican talking points — Obama’s health care bill is a sham, government is evil, and so on. His speeches in Montana were to remind his core constituency — white, ring-wing males — that he had tried but failed to find common ground with the sort of people who support “Obamacare,” those who want “more free stuff.”

The Montana crowds cheered Romney, but even the dopiest right-wingers know he once supported Obama-style health care and is incapable of taking a principled stand on important issues. His candidacy is hard for them to accept. It’s as if Karl Rove and a team of fascist engineers tried to create the ideal Republican robot but screwed up the coding and produced a monster of falseness, grotesquely awkward and cold, embarrassing to the very people they were hoping he would impress.

More here.

Homeopathic politics

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

The son of George Soros, who is also a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, will use a super PAC to hopefully put itself out of business by targeting House lawmakers who oppose campaign finance reform:

Jonathan Soros, son of a prominent liberal financier, is helping to launch an independent advocacy group with hopes of spending up to $8 million targeting House lawmakers, primarily Republicans, who oppose public matching funds for elections and other campaign finance reforms.

The new super PAC, called Friends of Democracy, will file its first disclosures with the Federal Election Commission later this month and plans to zero in on 10 to 15 House races with television ads, mailings and Web messaging, Soros and other organizers said Thursday.

Like all super PACs, Friends of Democracy will be able to raise unlimited funds from wealthy individuals, corporations or unions–precisely the kind of system that the group is fighting against.

[…] “We openly acknowledge the irony of being a super PAC trying to address money in politics,” Soros said in an interview in Washington. “But our goal is to eventually decrease the influence of this kind of group…We don’t see any other path to real legislative change.”

Silencing unions in CA

~ susie

An alert from David Dayen:

After the victory in Wisconsin, many wondered where conservative interests would strike next to finish off unions and permanently alter the power relationship between labor and capital. It appears the next step is California. In November, voters will decide on an initiative, Prop 32, that would “eliminate unions from having any voice in politics whatsoever,” according to one labor official.


In its simplest form the measure, often called “paycheck protection” on the right, would stop unions from using automatic payroll deductions from their members for political activity. Similar measures have been on the ballot before in California, and have been beaten back both times. In 1998, voters rejected Prop 226, and in 2005, they similarly beat back Prop 75. But those were frontal assaults against unions. The difference here is that the supporters have dressed up this initiative as a campaign finance reform measure that affects corporations and unions in equal measure. Prop 32 supports call it the “Stop Special Interest Money Initiative.” Nothing could be further from the truth, says the opposition to Prop 32.


“The people who drafted this are the same people who twice before tried this and failed,” says Brian Brokaw, the communications director for No on 32. “They claim that it’s even-handed, in that it bans both unions and corporations from collecting political funds via payroll deductions. But corporations don’t use payroll deductions for political funds, they just use their own treasuries.”


It’s actually more insidious than that. The initiative has two parts. First, it bans direct political donations to state candidates from both corporations and unions. Neither side does a whole lot of that, as independent expenditures are more common in support of or opposition to individual candidates. But the definition of a “corporation” is made so narrow in the initiative language, granting a number of special exemptions to entities such as LLCs, limited partnerships, insurance companies, hedge funds, developers, Wall Street investment firms and more. “They carefully drafted this to exempt themselves,” Brokaw says. Any corporation could set up a shell company and continue the practice of direct political contributions.

Hoarders

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

And they wonder why we despise them:

WASHINGTON — The job market is stagnant and the GOP has the federal government tied up in knots, so the country’s short-term economic future is in the hands of America’s titans of industry and finance.

But despite having an unprecedented amount of cash on hand with which to create jobs — more than $3 trillion, nearly four times as much as the 2009 stimulus bill — the corporations aren’t spending and the banks aren’t lending.

“They’ve been making money, and they haven’t been spending it. So it sits there,” said Jared Bernstein, a former economic adviser to President Barack Obama now at the non-partisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “The economy has been growing since the second half of 2009, and the vast majority of households have seen very little of that. It’s got to be going somewhere.”

Think of it as corporate austerity.

“In a more normal economic recession, you would expect business reinvesting to grow,” said Brandon Rees, deputy director of the office of investment at the AFL-CIO, the labor union federation. But instead, “that money just keeps piling up,” he said. “The CEOs just can’t figure out what to do with it all.”
Continue reading “Hoarders” →

Moyers: ‘You can only push your subjects so far’

~ odd man out ~ 3 Comments

Earlier this week, Mitt Romney and his handlers flaunted the Republican Party’s contempt for the 99 percent by holding several fund-raisers at the Hamptons, one of them at the estate of billionaire right-wing activist David Koch. This classic “let them eat cake” event indicated the GOP is literally banking on the notion that the poor and near-poor will be awed into voting for the very people who continue to exploit them.

I couldn’t help but wonder, as usual, at what point Americans will realize these arrogant would-be aristocrats, with plenty of help from the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision — have made a sick joke of democracy by and for the people.

Mild-mannered, compassionate Bill Moyers wondered the same thing. How much blatant celebration by the GOP of the widening gap between rich and poor is too much for average Americans to stomach? He thinks we might be at the tipping point:

… Three things don’t go together: Money. Secrecy. Democracy. And that’s the nub of the matter. This is all a sham for invalidating democracy in the name of democracy. It’s the trick authoritarians always use to hide their real intention – in this case absolute power over our public life and institutions: the privatization of everything. The Supreme Court is pointing the way. Instead of mitigating the worst excesses of both the state and the private sector, the Court has taken sides. Saying to the massed wealth of the one percent: America is yours for the taking, for the buying…

More here.